“No?”
“Nah. I just want to run with my friends. And”—he paused to navigate some roots pushing through the sidewalk, then stayed quiet a little longer than she expected—“you know how you used to tell me you wanted me to run because it helped you think? I was hoping it would work for me, too. You said it helped you think, and it helped you stop overthinking. That’s what I want.”
“Is the Pilot bothering you? Is something wrong?”
“No! I mean, I know I need it, and I’m doing way better in school, and it can be fun. It’s just . . . loud.”
“Is there a way to adjust the volume?”
He looked at her weirdly. She shut up again. “No, not volume loud . . . how can I say this? Busy. My head is always busy.”
“Mine is like that, too, sometimes, so I can’t imagine what yours must be like.” She stole a glance at him. He ran with his head neutral and his shoulders back, easily, naturally perfect. She wondered what else he was doing in his head while they ran. Math problems? Spanish conjugations?
“Yeah . . . I thought maybe if I ran I’d shut it up for a minute.”
“I hope so, too.” She increased the pace, and he matched her stride for stride.
CHAPTER NINE
DAVID
David had never felt more adult than when he called the Installation Center on his own. The brochures had said that follow-up appointments were free. He was proud of himself for having read that, and for remembering it all these months later, and for finding his patient number in the user app, and for making the appointment to talk with a doctor, all without asking for help or telling anyone he’d done it.
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t have accepted his parents’ assistance; he was just ashamed to ask. Asking meant admitting something was wrong, admitting it beyond what he’d said to Val while running, or what he’d asked Milo about. And which mom to ask? Val worked hard not to judge and hadn’t pressed him when he’d mentioned it to her, but she’d been opposed to the whole Pilot thing to begin with. She’d tell him to get it removed and call it a failed experiment. Julie had clearly been more into the idea, had pressed him more than once about what it felt like and how effective it actually was. She also loved talking about how BNL had brought jobs to her boss’s district and boosted his popularity. Admitting a problem to her felt like a betrayal.
Or more than a betrayal; a personal failure. Failure to adapt, failure to thrive, failure to use a device that was supposed to be too straightforward for user error, so that he felt like a fool. Failure to do easily what everyone else did easily. Story of high school so far: run twice as fast to keep up. Now he had to face that if nothing was wrong with his implant, something must be wrong with him.
All of which was why he took a bus to the Installation Center rather than tell anyone he was going. He only had to skip last period and track practice to make his four p.m. appointment. The schools shared their athletic facilities and Val would be there coaching her girls, but his own coach liked to send them out to run in the neighborhood; she would assume she’d missed him, not that he wasn’t there.
He’d researched the route and how to pay, but the bus presented a challenge beyond the fact that he’d never taken city transit on his own. The challenge was part of why he needed his implant checked out. He sat at the back, and the engine rattled the seat, and there was a window open even though it was still pretty chilly outside, and it was midafternoon, so students hadn’t started filling the bus, but there were enough people to make him dizzy.
Dizzy because his Pilot thought every detail deserved attention, like a photo where everything is in focus, so you don’t know where the photographer meant for you to look. The mother singing to a crying baby, the man muttering to himself, the person with a protesting cat hidden in their bag, the skinny-necked man with the greasy mustache wearing an enormous trench coat stuffed with grocery bags in every pocket and who smelled like the worst body odor David had ever smelled, and the kid with music spilling out of his enormous headphones, and the stop-start of the bus, and the traffic streaming by outside, and the litany of upcoming stops through the unintelligible PA. Nobody else on the bus seemed bothered, and he didn’t notice any other Pilots; sometimes he forgot his rich-kid school wasn’t like the rest of the city.
The noise was a good reminder of why he’d made the appointment; when the bus finally reached his destination, he was relieved to escape onto the hilltop above the fancy mall. He had to dodge a few cars that cut across parking lot rows at angles, the drivers glaring at him like it was his fault they almost hit him just because he was on foot. All the stores had names that sounded too expensive for his family; the wealth was in the ampersands. Or in the syllables, like Balkenhol, spelled across the stand-alone building in tastefully futuristic–brand font.
It felt strange to walk into the place alone. Adult. He’d have to learn to do all this stuff on his own sooner or later, so he might as well start. If he took over booking his real doctor appointments, too, maybe he could show his moms a new level of responsibility, to reward their investment in the Pilot, to show them he was doing okay. One less thing for them to worry about.
He expected the greeter to give him a hard time, but she took his name and device registration
